Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Buai impressionism
The aircraft circled slowly over a parched landscape. Below, the atmosphere was thick with smoke as the rank, brown savannah burned. In the wet–dry tropics, fire rends the landscape the way an archaeologist strips layers of sediment with a trowel. Here it had revealed a dozen old horseshoe-shaped redoubts (once used to shelter aircraft from bomb attacks) encircling the airstrip, vast piles of discarded fuel drums, and the skeletons of armoured vehicles and other such remanie of the Second World War.
This was Jackson Airport, gateway to Papua New Guinea, a nation which in December 1981 was less than six years old. It was definitely not the luxuriant, jungle-clad New Guinea landscape I had imagined countless times in my dreams.
* * *
My first memories of Port Moresby are still vivid. Dark-skinned women and children sitting on each street corner before piles of buai (betel nut) and daka (fruit of the pepper vine chewed with buai), or perhaps neat bundles of peanuts as I had never seen them before, tied together by their stalks.
At first I took the red stains lying on every footpath and wall to be blood. The result, perhaps, of violent assault and bloody riot. It was only later, after much private anguish, that I learned that the stains were buai. When the kernel of the small green nut is chewed with lime (made from crushing burned sea-shells) and daka, the mixture turns bright red. Chewing buai ends when a great red stream of liquid is ejected from the mouth, often with extraordinary force, accuracy and aplomb.
The first flush of innocent inquiry allows a person a kind of liberty which fuller knowledge denies them. Satisfied that the streets of Port Moresby were not steeped in blood, I felt free to roam where I would — even once as far as the front bar of the notorious Boroko Hotel.
That evening, after I'd drunk a beer or two in a hushed silence and surrounded by dark stares, a couple of young Hanuabada lads suggested that they would walk me back to Angau Lodge where I was staying. It was only as we neared home that, noticing the barbed-wire compounds and vicious dogs surrounding every house in Boroko, I realised they had certainly saved my money, and possibly my life.
I soon found that the best and cheapest places to eat in Moresby were the Chinese cafes. The Diamond Cafe in Boroko became my favourite. Its laminex table-tops and simple menu reminded me of the Chinese restaurants of my childhood, of my father bringing our own saucepans to be filled with fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. One night, I noticed that a curious addition had been chalked on the menu board. Below the chow mein was written Papa Fell Over. Intrigued, and suspecting it to be some exceedingly alcoholic local brew, I ordered a small one with coffee.
Startlingly renamed in Melanesian Pidgin, and transmogrified in a Chinese kitchen, that distinctively Australian dessert pavlova never tasted so good.
* * *
Koki Market nestles by the sea near Ela Beach. This beautiful, exotic place drew me daily. A sea of constantly moving black bodies crowded the square, the musky animal smell of humanity blend with the distinctive spice of buai. Huge red splashes of the latter seemed to be concentrated around a sign proclaiming NO KEN KAIKAI BUAI HIA (BETEL NUT CHEWING PROHIBITED). Nearby, an old fellow sat each morning, dressed in a simple laplap, with just a few buai for sale in front of him, his grizzled head nodding. One afternoon there were only two fruit left as he made a painful effort to unbend his arthritic joints. A woman screamed out in Motuan, 'Hey old man, you've left your balls behind!' and the entire marketplace rang with peals of hysterical laughter.
Gargantuan piles of fruit and vegetables always covered every market bench. Above this cornucopia hung mysteriously shaped bags and bundles, suspended by wooden hooks from the rafters of the tin-roofed shelters. I could see, occasionally, a bewildered-looking cuscus (a kind of possum) peek from one of the string bags, but the contents of others remained obscure. I desperately wished to acquire some cuscusses for our museum collection. Before I realised that the bundles could contain anything from groceries to babies, I sometimes found myself bargaining, in this language I barely understood, for pikininis rather than possums.
Near the water one day, a mammoth hawksbill turtle lay on its back in the sun, gulping helplessly, its eyes streaming salty tears. This was the seafood section. Someone had already purchased a fore-flipper. Shocked by the cruelty, I abandonedthoughts of turtle soup and instead purchased two live kindam, beautiful painted crayfish, for less than a dollar each. Never did I imagine that my meagre field allowance would extend to such luxuries.
Just behind were the meat stalls. There, piled in their dozens, were the smoked bodies of wallabies. The smell of the smoky wood fire was dense, yet was insufficient to deter the clouds of flies which hovered about. I paid my five kina to an old man, blind in one eye and with his shotgun resting behind him, and at one stroke collected my first specimen in New Guinea and solved the riddle of what to curry for tomorrow's dinner.
Leaving the market that day, I joined an enormous crowd gathered around the entrance of a dingy Chinese trade store. Young and old alike were pressed together, their mouths forming solemn Os as they craned their necks upward. Their faces were filled with amazement. After fighting my way through the crowd I discovered what transfixed them — television had just come to Port Moresby.
The twentieth century appeared to be catching up with New Guinea. But Port Moresby was a long way from Mt Albert Edward. This high, isolated mountain was the place where I hoped to encounter the timeless New Guinea of my dreams. I had not seen the mountain when I first arrived, for smoke from the innumerable dry-season fires had obscured it. It remained hidden until dawn on the very morning I was to fly to its base.
CHAPTER 2
The fear of heaven
Flatness trains the Australian eye not to stray far above the horizon, so while I stood in the dawn light at the airport, I missed the massif at first. The jagged, dark green peaks of the Owen Stanley Range receded away to the north, their summits becoming increasingly obscured in dawn-tinged cloud. Through a trick of the atmosphere, a pale blue band of sky appeared to rise over the mist. For some reason my eye made an effort to search above this point — and met with a seemingly impossible illusion. There, as if floating, detached above all, were two further peaks. Not dark green these, but golden and purple from the frigid grassland and jagged rock crowning their summit. I fancied that a lost ice age, a new world, beckoned to me from those two islands in the sky. The furthest, Mt Albert Edward, was my destination.
My journey to Papua New Guinea had been made possible by Dr Geoffrey Hope, a palaeo-botanist. At that time he was almost like a god to me. He spoke Pidgin fluently, he had climbed to the Carstensz Glacier in Irian Jaya ten years previously, and knew more about New Guinea than anyone else I had met. A lecturer in geography at the Australian National University, Geoff is one of the most inspiring of all teachers. A real adventurer, he creates irresistible opportunities for students to travel with him to remote places.
Geoff was mounting an expedition to Kosipe, below Mt Albert Edward, because some ancient stone axes had been unearthed there some years before. He thought that sediments in the region might hold fossil pollen which would give some idea of long-term climate and vegetation change there, as well as, perhaps, some idea of the early human impacts on the environment.
On that first trip, Geoff was accompanied by his partner, Bren Wetherstone; their infant son, Julian; Geoff's mother, Penelope; and his father, Alec. I was also in awe of Geoff's father, better known as A. D. Hope. He wrote the finest modern poetry I had ever read. Strangely, I thought, this great man would actually talk to me, a mere student!
Penelope Hope, Geoff's mother, had grown up in the Gulf of Papua, where her father was a trader. She knew the country well, and told me much of her experiences as a child. For her, this was to be a last trip of reminiscence.
With infants and the elderly, however, it was hardly a party that satisfied my desire to undertake life-and-death adventure in a remote New Guinea jungle. The expedition, was, though, to give me experiences I could never repeat. For through it I saw a little of the taim bilong masta — the time when white men ruled New Guinea. I look back on it now as an invaluable peek at the way Papua New Guinea used to be.
A. D. Hope seemed to be quite interested in our work, and was particularly fascinated with the small animals we caught.
One day, I trapped a small carnivorous marsupial, a relative of the Australian Antechinus. A. D. Hope was ecstatic. He questioned me intensively about the beast and its sexual habits, before explaining that his most recent book of poems was called Antechinus. The work had the sex lives of these strange marsupials as a major theme. Their reproductive pattern is unusual in that males live only eleven months, while females can live years. The last month of the life of the males is spent in search of sexual fulfilment, an exercise so strenuous that it inevitably leads to their death. Later I received a copy of Antechinus, beautifully inscribed by Hope in celebration of our time spent peering at a tiny marsupial.
Our plan was to fly Hopes junior, senior and middle-aged to Kosipe, a Catholic mission station at the base of the mountain. Ken Aplin (a fellow student) and I were to be dropped off at Woitape, some fifteen kilometres away, to walk the rest of the way in.
Sometimes walking has advantages over flying, for it gives an entirely different feel for the context of the place you are visiting. The track from Woitape to Kosipe was a good one, used for tractor access. Following it, we wound our way for five hours through forest and regrowth. Someone accustomed to the open forests of Australia begins to feel hemmed in on such a track, for the vegetation is dense, blocking out vistas. But finally a splendid and entirely unexpected scene opened before us.
The mission station at Kosipe lies in an exquisite mountain valley, behind which rises, in tier after tier, majestic Mt Albert Edward. On this clear afternoon its summit glowed purple against the sky. The valley floor was almost entirely taken up with a great swamp. This was what Geoff had come to take a core from, in order to examine vegetation changes through the ages. Around it was a grassland which rose and fell in little prominences and flats. The afternoon air was crisp and cool. There was something distinctly European about the scene. Dotted everywhere around the valley, but particularly on the higher ground, lay immaculate, steep-roofed, double-storey Swiss chalets, between which grazed cattle and horses. Further in the distance, hidden in clumps of trees, wisps of smoke betrayed the presence of the villages of the Goilala people.
This beautiful place was the result of the synergy between two superficially different, yet fundamentally similar mountain cultures. The grasslands of the Kosipe Valley were created by the Goilala, the original inhabitants of the place. Before the establishment of the mission, they had lived down the valley. They had made this clearing in just the past forty years or so. Whenever conditions permitted they burned the forest, creating an ever-broadening expanse of grass.
The chalets, cattle and horses, on the other hand, were the work of Father Alexandre Michaellod, one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.
Father Michaellod had been unfortunate enough to be born the eleventh child of a humble Swiss Catholic dairy farmer. In the early twentieth century, there were virtually no prospects for such a child. The time-honoured — indeed only — option was to enter a monastery. Michaellod did this at the age of twelve. There he learned to make several varieties of cheese and, by his own admission, became bored nearly to death. Then the opportunity arose to become a missionary. After a brief period of training, Michaellod was sent off to New Guinea. Even on the ship, he was under the distinct impression that he was bound for somewhere in Africa.
When Michaellod finally arrived at the Catholic mission station on the south coastal island of Yule, he was assigned the near suicidal task of proselytising in the then largely uncontacted Mendi area. According to one account (possibly apocryphal), when told of his task, Michaellod swore, spat on the ground three times, and stamped off to begin his journey.
Despite the difficulty of his task, Michaellod was outstandingly successful in bringing the gospel to the Mendi — so successful indeed that he was sent next to establish a mission among the Goilala.
The Goilala have a nasty reputation. One of the most infamous raskol gangs in Port Moresby is named '105', a sort of mirror image of the first three letters of the word Goilala. The daring and brutality of the 105 gang is legendary. Just a year after we left Kosipe a Belgian doctor was murdered while climbing Mt Albert Edward. His Goilala guides, newly out of prison, drove an axe into the back of his head before robbing him. The first aircraft ever hijacked in Papua New Guinea (in September 1995) landed at Kosipe, its pilot making the difficult touchdown at the — by then — abandoned airstrip with a shotgun held to his head.
A New Guinean friend once told me about his grandfather, a police sergeant who worked in the Goilala area in the 1930s. As a Papuan with rank, he could lead a police team when tracking down wrongdoers without the supervision of a kiap (government official). His favourite tactic was to track the miscreants back to their village. There, in the early hours of the morning, he would torch the men's house, then stand at the door with rifle in hand. As the sleepy warriors emerged through the door trying to escape the conflagration, he would shoot them through the head.
In his dotage, the old fellow found his many sins difficult to forgive. He would often ask his grandson about divine justice. Why, he asked, if God was just, would He let an old bastard such as himself live to such a ripe old age, yet see so many good men die young?
Strangely though, when my friend visited the Goilala area he found that his grandfather's name was common among younger men. Despite his tactics, the hard old fellow had been admired by the Goilala. A generation of young namesakes was their tribute to him.
This story threw some light on Michaellod. He seemed an extraordinary man just for staying so long at Kosipe. Yet I liked him for much more than that. He was a complex and intelligent person who had given his life in the service of a faith he never questioned. But sadly, by 1981, he was something of ananachronism — newer Roman Catholic missionaries tend to see themselves as facilitators who guide rather than rule. Father Michaellod, in his way, was of the older, more authoritarian school. Having spent much of his life in New Guinea highland societies, he had become profoundly affected by them. Many in his congregation expected their priest to act like a 'big man', and in the best traditions of New Guinea big men Michaellod was both feared and respected. This suited the older Goilala, for they were comfortable with such an old-style leader.
Michaellod remembered clearly his first contact with the Goilala. How he had trekked through the dense jungle, alone and clad in black robes, and had terrified the ebullient mountaineers. They fled from their villages, leaving a few frail old women in occupation. Only after some days did the others dare to return. Michaellod, unable to speak the Goilala language, decided that contact with children was the best way to win the confidence of the adults. He would offer a child a boiled sweet, then take it by the hand and lead it into his hut to talk.
Many years later Michaellod at last understood why the mothers had wailed in grief as he led their children away. When a Goilala takes someone by the hand and leads them off to a private place, it is an inevitable prelude to intercourse. For years the Goilala believed that the solemn man with no sexual interest in women was a pederast.
His first attempts at proselytising were a dismal failure. The men refused to allow the women access to religious knowledge. When they finally consented, it was only under the condition that they be taught separately by Michaellod's catechist. This pious coastal man would not look upon the nakedness of Goilala women, and took to holding up drawings depicting Christian doctrine while positioned behind the trunk of a tree. These would then be discussed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Throwim Way Leg"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Tim Flannery.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
